Drink Deep, or Taste Not

As you read, immersive corneal overlays and cerebral amplification implants provide you all the shunted transmissions and cross-referencing you can handle. Your great-grandparents joked about teachers telling them, “You can’t learn by osmosis” when they’d fall asleep on their open textbooks. The idiom is quaint.

There are Alexandrian halls in your headspace, and you are one excited uber-monkey ooh-ooh-oohing over the continuous feeds of streaming information from which you may drink.

You are not dreaming.

Sleep becomes an intrusive element on your time. You float down rivers of data churning and eddying along manipulated alpha through delta states. Your life has become a series of staccato REM states. You float/sleep in quarter-hour intervals every four hours because that works best for your wetware services and productivity. Moving through this world, you discover epochs of associative content available to you. You have become a transparent eyeball.

You will never need anything other than Turing-Paper™ for old-fashioned writing on the off chance you want to project thoughts onto a page fluxing with nano-ink. In fact, you do have a project to send your instructor via avatar: “Paradigm Shifts and Burst Culture: A Look at Human Potentiality from the Paleolithic through the Singularity.”

Yes, it’s due soon, so you get started as the 3D printer hums and buzzes its way through a round of replacement parts for your mini-mecha (you call it Gilgamesh). There’s a remote tournament in a few days, and you haven’t repaired Gilgamesh from last time (you won third place in a field of eighty competitors).

You send a line command to your SimulacraBuddy™, and s/he makes the necessary repairs and upgrades to Gilgamesh.

A pinging reminder comes. It’s been four hours.

Time for another float/sleep.

After all, doesn’t an eight-year-old child need rest?

Ω

Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia with his wife and two children. He teaches high school English, is a long-time martial artist, and has a big geeky spot in his heart for literature, speculative fiction, and comic books.